Son of the painter Antonio P. and great-grandson of Giacomo P. Elder (v.), he learned the art from his father and was a pupil of Titian, whose last masterpiece, the *Pietà* (Accademia di Venezia), he completed. As a young man he went to Urbino and from there to Rome, where he stayed for eight years, studying Michelangelo. Returning to Venice, he defined his pictorial style, blending the teachings of the great 16th-century Venetians, especially Tintoretto, and creating an easy, mechanical manner aimed at superficial effects and the monotonous repetition of conventional schemes. In this way he became the chief agent in the decline of Venetian painting of the time.
One of his first works is the decoration of the sacristy of S. Giacomo dell'Orto; among his best is the decoration of the oratory of the Crociferi (which he worked on for 12 years), where there are passages full of realistic spontaneity and narrative simplicity, with some excellent portraits. In his later works a rhetorical search for effects prevails, achieved with a tenebrous chiaroscuro that very rarely lights up with vivid, resounding tones. He produced many works for the Doge's Palace: from *The Assault on Constantinople* to the great ceiling with *Venice Crowned by Victory* (Hall of the Great Council), to the cold and conventional allegorical representations of the League of Cambrai and the Oath of the Venetian Cities to the Dominant, to the superficial *Last Judgment* in the Hall of Scrutiny. His works are extremely numerous in Venetian churches and in the Veneto, at Sansepolcro, etc.